The nine-year fallout from Barr's 2018 tweet flared up again after her former TV son said the reboot's cancellation was justified, and she answered on a podcast with a string of insults.
Roseanne Barr is still not over 2018. And on Wednesday's episode of the podcast "Can't Be Censored," she made that very clear, going after her former on-screen son Michael Fishman with language that left little to the imagination.
"Go f--k yourself, you little f--king worm," Barr said, according to Variety and TheWrap, both of which reviewed the episode. "And I'm glad they fired you, because I was the only reason you were ever on that show. They wanted to get rid of you in the reboot, and I made them take you back."
The trigger was old news dressed up as new. Back in August, Fishman had pushed back on a fan who called Barr's cancellation unfair, saying flatly that "the show was rightfully canceled." Podcast host Travis Dhanraj brought that comment up on air. Barr didn't let him finish the question.
Her reboot of "Roseanne" was pulled by ABC in 2018 after she posted a tweet linking Valerie Jarrett, a Black former adviser to Barack Obama, to "Planet of the Apes" and the Muslim Brotherhood. The post was read across the industry as racist. Barr has always disputed that reading, and she did again on the podcast, insisting the line referred to the Iran nuclear deal and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, not to Jarrett's race.
"You have no geopolitical context whatsoever to discuss what I said," she told Fishman, per the podcast audio cited by both outlets. "You think I said, 'Black people look like monkeys.'"
She also claimed Fishman once asked her directly to explain the tweet, and that her answer at the time was considerably less polite than anything printed here. "Let me explain this, Michael," she said she told him. "Don't put my name in your f--king mouth. Shut the f--k up. You are an ignoramus and a bigot."
Fishman has never budged on this. Days after the reboot's cancellation in 2018 he called Barr's remarks about co-stars "reprehensible and intolerable," and Barr responded then by accusing him of throwing her under the bus. His August comments, posted on Instagram, went further, connecting the dehumanising language of the tweet to what he called real-world harm, name-checking Trey Reed and Tasha Fortune as examples. "There was no joke," he said. "And the show was rightfully canceled."
There's a second layer to Barr's anger, and it's about money and credit, not politics. She claims she personally lobbied to keep Fishman's character, D.J. Conner, in the reboot cast after producers wanted him gone. Fishman went on to appear in "The Conners," the spin-off that continued without Barr, for four seasons before he was written out ahead of season five in 2022. Nobody at ABC has ever explained that decision publicly, and Fishman himself has only said he was told he wouldn't be back.
Neither Fishman nor ABC has responded publicly to Wednesday's outburst yet. Given how this argument has resurfaced every few months since 2018, it's unlikely to be the last word from either side.
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